It’s been a while since I’d done any PHP (all of the recent web-dev stuff I’ve written has been either JSP, Python or CGI) so I thought I’d keep some notes on my own ‘refresher course’ and do a brief write up of the main steps involved.

Both of these apps are basically quite similar; they take some user input, search in a database, then display the results on a web page.

And that’s about it – some sanity checking and error handling is needed, plus outputting the HTML part, but for a quick and simple PHP page that takes user input, queries a database and shows results, the above steps should do the job.

As I’m using WordPress I wanted to get my PHP pages looking like they “belong” (getting my custom PHP pages to use the current WordPress Theme and CSS etc); there are several solutions for this like WordPress plugins for custom PHP pages and creating custom WordPress Templates. For now I have just included my PHP examples in an iFrame and explicitly use the site’s CSS to make them fit in, but I’d like to investigate what works best for me and sort this out “properly” at some point.

Here are my notes on installing and configuring Postfix on an Ubuntu host for WordPress.

By default, my WordPress and Ubuntu installation wasn’t able to send out emails to do things like set up new users, notify me about new posts, reset forgotten passwords etc etc. Getting Postfix working is not very difficult once you’ve figured out what settings to use in the main.cf file.

First, install Postfix:

apt-get install postfix

and copy over the example config file/template:

cp /usr/share/postfix/main.cf.debian /etc/postfix/main.cf

I then realised I’d already installed Sendmail on this box (doh!) so that needed killed and cleaned up:

ps -eaf | grep [s]endmail

kill -9 {the pid}

apt-get uninstall sendmail

Now I could start up postfix:

/usr/sbin/postfix start

I’d gone with the default options during the initial install, but it looks like they need a bit of a rethink…

dpkg-reconfigure postfix

then backup and tweak this file to suit:

vi /etc/postfix/main.cf

after which you may need to do “postfix reload”

Once that looked reasonably ok I wanted to test sending mail from the command line – there was no mailx/mail tool present but the mailutils package looked worth a try:

apt-get install mailutils

this gave me a “mail” command, so the next step was to test sending myself an internal mail

Here’s a note of what I needed to do in order to get WordPress serving as the default site on my domain – it was originally at www.donaldsimpson.co.uk/wordpress/ and I wanted it to just be www.donaldsimpson.co.uk

A bit of a Google shows there are many ways to do this, but here’s how I did it:

vi /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

then comment the current entry and add a new one pointing to the htdocs dir for WordPress:

Then restart Apache (/opt/bitnami/apache2/bin/apachectl restart or similar) after which you just need to go to the WordPress Admin General Settings page and change these values to point to the root of your site/domain:

WodPress address (URL) www.donaldsimpson.co.uk

Site address (URL) www.donaldsimpson.co.uk

And that should be that – you can now delete that backup you made at the start…

Update:

It’s may be a good idea to define your WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL in your wp-config.php file too, like so: